Suchergebnisse

Flexibility is often considered an advantage to workers, especially women. This article shows, however, that, in relation to home-based work by rural women workers, flexibility, when set within the frame work of the family ethic, is often a trade-off for job security, wages, and other benefits. The author suggests that work can become flexible only when tasks are no longer rigidly gendered.

Abstract A resurgence of informal economic work, such as home‐working, occurred in some rural areas during the 1970s and the 1980s. In two midwestern communities, an employer of industrial homeworkers was recruited in an effort to boost the local economy with new jobs. In these communities, ideas about women's roles in households and the labor market are crucial to the states' ability to couple industrial homeworking with rural community development. Industrial homeworking as development in the United States shows how development goals support and maintain the sexual division of labor in households and in the local labor market. Personal interviews and archival documents form the basis of the case study data. These data are content‐analyzed for themes about the process of development and the relationship of the local states and industrial firms.

Social work as an academic discipline has long included women and gender as central categories of analysis; the social work profession, started and maintained largely by women, has been home to several generations of feminists. Yet, social work is curiously and strikingly absent from broader multidisciplinary discussions of feminist research. This article explores contemporary feminist social work research by examining 50 randomly selected research-based articles that claimed feminism within their work. The analysis focused on the authors' treatment of the gender binary, their grounding in theory, their treatment of methodology, and their feminist claims. Feminist social work researchers are invited to reconceptualize feminisms to include third-wave feminist thought and more explicitly engage theory and reflexivity in their work.